I (20M) had this woman friend (19F) when we were teens, like 15 and 16. The friend talked behind people’s backs. She made fun of them for being wheelchair users, autistic, etc. She said she didn’t want to be that way but she was. Me and my other friend went along with it and called her a good person. We defended her because she was good to us and that’s all that mattered.
She said autistic people were dogs. She wanted to kill my autistic friend. She said he was so ugly, he would never have a girlfriend and didn’t deserve a hug. She told an autistic girl who was traumatized she didn’t deserve a hug either because autistic people are “disgusting” and “her slaves”.
She saw a garbage can and told her friends that a mildly stocky girl (as in her body type) with some eating disorder that the garbage can was donations for her food :(
I never saw her again, but I’m glad I could recover and be a better person, hopefully a good one to autistic people. I do feel bad that I didn’t help him though.
Regret is a reminder that you’ve grown as a person and you want to do better. Every person on earth is a work in progress.
You can always choose to be a better person. Thank you for making that choice and owning it.
The greatest revelation of true adulthood is understanding just how much of your life up to that point was a phase. You thought you were “different”, better, smarter, invulnerable. I hope to have the chance to run into people I thought less of while in school and discover they are living full lives beyond our origins. Every time I cringe at something I said as a teen I try to remind myself that others grew beyond their failures too.
Take it from somebody very similar age wise. We all make mistake, and its better to have a bad experience. And be able to go “that was shitty of me”, it was highschool/middle school i am autistic and hung around with people who were not very smart and did alot of stupid stuff. Heck up into 2021 i thought you had to pick a political party and defend them for there shitty stuff. Thanks to my uncle and family i see the world in grays intead of blacks and whites now, and its never to late to change. Dont see yourself as a bad person, good people find themselfs in hard places where your judgement is clouded by many things. Peer pressure, wanting to find your identity and so on. Alot of high school and middle school is figuring out who you are as a person and many times we get blind in the moment.
You’re not horrible, you were a kid. You’re a kinder man now.
20 is old enough to know better. There’s no redemption for you for being around it as long as you were
Brain development, namely executive function—the wiring that allows you to connect knowledge to performance as well as to perceive and understand nuance, amongst other functions—are still in development into the mid-20s. And that’s without factors like the delays caused by neurodivergence, if present, to say nothing of the impact of psychosocial factors.
All that aside, we need way more open arms to anybody, at any age, who is looking to grow and rectify their past behaviors and attitudes. “I was wrong” is intrapsychically and socially one of the harder things for any of us to cop to. Kudos to anyone who does.
People take alot of time to have aha moments some people never do sadly. Its never to late to change as a person.
